


a swarm of little bugses

by quills_of_the_wicked



Category: Lucifer (Comic), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: (mentioned) - Freeform, (namely that time Maze got kidnapped), Gen, Insects, Maze Has An Existential Crisis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stream of Consciousness, allusions to past trauma, also allusions to self-harm, but both of the above are confined to an aside between parenthesis so...skip that if you please, my friends seem to think this is one of the best things I've ever written and I love them for it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 17:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17288384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quills_of_the_wicked/pseuds/quills_of_the_wicked
Summary: "Hmph. If you don't let me in, I'll turn you into a demon half-face waitress night-club lady with a crush on her boss, and I'll make it so you've been that from the beginning of time to now and you'll never ever know if you were anything else and it will itch inside your head worse than little bugses."





	a swarm of little bugses

There are insects in Mazikeen's head. Every day, they bite and nibble and burrow, trying to break through ridges of exposed muscle and bone to the sweet marrow beneath. They are maggots, if one wishes to be technical, and half-human talons make quick work of them. Hell developed a proper form of insect repellent, eventually, but until then, she could be found by the trail of unfortunate flies pulped to nothingness beneath her heels.

Eons later, or maybe mere days, because time loses meaning if you can't truly run out of it, she meets a little girl. She is a twisted, iridescent Alice, with prisms in her eyes and rainbows in her hair and a brain pierced by endless shards of glass. She barely stands to Mazikeen's waist, and when she introduces herself, the words fuzz and blur as if she said one thing and meant another. And Mazikeen tells her to leave, and the tiny rainbow girl pouts. Pushing up on her wiggly toes, she hisses, and curses the sides of Mazikeen's face until the maggots can slip their way into her brain. 

///

One vulnerable night, entrapped in Mazikeen's arms, Lucifer whispers of Heaven. They lay skin pressed to skin wrapped in cool midnight air, and when he isn't gesturing he is cupping the moon like a crystal ball. His fingers indicate the glow, how it pales to the capital-G Glow reflected in the glass spires and how it's all a thousandth of a thousandth of capital-G Dear Old Dad’s power. She can hear, see how he still tastes bile at the thought, and yet….

And yet he holds shards in reverence, pieces of a long-pulverized mirror. Springs that rolled down plains of flawless marble, cupped hands, sips of water that tasted of wine and honey and sweetnesses mortal tongues could never know. Sleek feathers under his fingertips, and hands combing through his in turn, a warmth in his soul--

She cuts him off with a tug to his primaries, and has the grace (or lack thereof) to pretend she didn't see him weeping.

///

If you fly north along the coast, the beaches and redwoods eventually give way to sheer silver cliffs and pine. Everything is silent but the waves and the legions of cicadas, and Mazikeen lays herself in the grass as bees try to sip her perfume. Hell had always been crowded, but its denizens had the decency (if you will) to spread their noise and smog and malfeasance out just enough that the headache stayed metaphorical. Humans, though, they climb heavenward in towering clusters, building like termites until their inevitable collapse.

Some days, she loves the pandemonium (ha) of humanity, loves the riot of noise and colors and the dog-eat-dogma that the States seem so eternally fond of. Other days, she needs to touch the reality they so fondly denied. It was a simple truth she reflected on with her toes curled in the mud: humans, angels, demons, insects--all the same beasties (as a child might put it), just built differently. At least demons fell in line by choice, or at least they did once.

Hierarchies and hives, choirs and companies. The bugses crawl over her prefrontal cortex and bite, and as she stares into the sunset they force a question to her consciousness. What would she be if she wasn't herself?

She sinks into the dirt and reemerges in a dream, clawing herself out into a garden, or perhaps the Garden, straining against the light. For a moment, she hears traffic; a second later it's a whirl of wind through thick underbrush. Her mind compresses the eternity she's had into a human lifetime, and all it feels like is a pain so great it will split her bones in two. Such would be her mortal self: aching with the weight of a soul too heavy, looking skyward for falling stars.

She blinks, and the stage shifts into a vision of a Heaven she's never seen. There are no white clouds and harps (she knows better), but endless copies of one Image, swords sharp and whetstones hidden in palms. In the void beyond, a great Authority, and before there are stars in the vastness there is fair Samael, who asks why when he is told to jump. Who wouldn’t ask, or as any good angel would insist, who would? The Fallen would, and that was that, and she would follow.

To the ends of the universe, she had promised and writ in blood, more times than she can count. Wipe the slate clean from one end to the other, and she would still know his face in an instant, and he would hers.

But what if you had never met? the bugses ask, and she turns her head to pluck a stalk of honeysuckle, dragging her teeth over the stem until she tastes sweetness. The bees flock to her sticky hands, and what if? her mind insists. 

She stands, wings flaring, and the winds drag her hair from her face, baring her as she is and must always have been. There is nectar on her hands and power in her veins and the bees and cicadas and tides sing her name, and she will not have it another way.

Cliff diving is far safer when you have wings, but the adrenaline rush kicks in all the same.

///

Demons of pride and lust ask her why she refuses to spell her face back to symmetry. It would be so easy, they whisper, to just ask Lucifer, to borrow a sliver of his power and remake herself as beautiful as--

As what? she asks, every time, lips drawing into a snarl, and the smart demons take their insolence to a thousand-yard radius. Her face had been whole, once, and there wasn't a day when she hadn't tried to return it to its previous state. It always attracted the wrong type of attention.

(Time slips. Silver shackles burn her wrists and her face is whole and her lip is bitten to bleeding from one end to the other. By the time she is free, one side of her face is marred by blood and the other by ash. She casts the iron and silver aside with a triumphant laugh, and someone else's blood rolls onto her mouth. For a moment, it tastes better than anything she's ever had and anything she could imagine. The thought flicks through her head for a brief moment, that she'd make a terrible angel, but she can't savor it before she falls partway back into herself, her disgust, her fear. She grabs at her hairline, but her nails slip and her skin stays put.

It was lucky that Lucifer never wanted a wife.)

When the superior glow in Mazikeen's eyes drops to a distant flicker, Lucifer pulls her aside and carefully, oh so carefully, takes her upstairs. The mask goes first, flung carelessly across the room, and every time he kisses her with a hand cupping each cheek. It never takes much to haul her back; she comes on her own, lured by the urge to claim what is hers: his breath, his gaze, occasionally his jacket, always the star-filled tears hidden behind his eyes. She bears over him and takes all he gives, and in those moments they are wedded as either of them can allow. They have both belonged to others before themselves, and never will again.

///

She has been known by many names and many faces, few of them her own. Bride of Lucifer, Madame Morningstar, Great Sister of the Lillim. Hey Hot Stuff, which she usually answers with a fist.

Venus, after the other morning star, she is fond of. She has seen countless others with the name--on runways and street corners and paintings, always in paintings. Always solid, always smooth and self-assured and bare without shame, rising from the blood of men punished and standing ever so slightly out of reach. There were too many Venuses as consort and not enough as warrior for her taste, but you can't have everything. 

The epithet she is most fond of, though, the one she eternally styles herself to and the one that Lucifer whispers in her ear between breathless kisses, is queen. She stares out at the world and is satisfied by who she sees in her company: women lording high, answering to no master but their own morals, great insects raising colonies all around them, humans of every sort knocking rules down in her weight. Who is Mazikeen, if not the precursor of Boleyn and Boudica, if not the fellow of women who claw themselves to power inch by bloody inch, if not the rightful epicenter of everything she holds dear? 

That, she is certain, is the core of herself, if Mazikeen cannot be the center of this buggy little riddle. Of this she is certain: she is the storm and the horde and the tide, rightful member of the Lilim, fearsome warrior, companion to Lucifer but belonging firstly and solely to herself. She is Mazikeen, and always shall be, and damn anything that came before.


End file.
